Sherman Alexie, Peacenik

The noted artist shares his thoughts on peace, poetry, and Dubya's literacy gap.

LAST SATURDAY, millions of people around the world took part in the largest day of anti-war rallies to date protesting the Folly of Dubya. Here in Seattle, at the protest podium for the first time in his life stood . . . Sherman Alexie?

"Wouldn't it be great if we could send Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, John Updike, Nathan Lane . . . grab 20 artists and send them to Iraq?"

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Alexie has taken the unlikeliest of paths, a Native American poet from the Spokane res, via Pullman, and on to novels, screenplays, movies, fame, and more poetry. Throughout, his work has always had political themes. But it's also had humor, sadness, love, triumph, despair, courage, and dozens of other attributes that make for great artand are notably missing from most anti-war rallies.

"This'll be the first time," Alexie acknowledged on the phone from L.A. (naturally) last week. "We're close to living under a dictatorship. I'm afraid that if we don't stand up to policies now, whatever they may be . . . " His voice trails off. "This is not just about war."

One of the factors inspiring Alexiebut only onewas the fiasco that ensued when Sam Hamill, a Port Townsend poet and founding editor of the highly respected Copper Canyon Press, was invited to a Feb. 12 White House symposium, hosted by first lady Laura Bush, that was to honor the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Walt Whitman.

Hamill decided that his only ethical choice was to carry a message of opposition to war from himself and fellow poets. He e-mailed some 50 colleagues asking for support.

The e-mail exploded across the Internet, and thousands weighed in. At that point, rather than receive Hamill's mountain of e-mails and letters, the first lady canceled the symposium, declaring that it "would be inappropriate to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum."

Alexie snorts. "I'm certainly not going to listen to the warmongering of a president, vice president, and secretary of defense who didn't serve in the military, who did everything they could to not go into war. If they didn't want to go to war [themselves], I'm not sure why others should.

"The man [Bush] has not read enough books to have a developed moral sense. It's the un- and undereducated who speak in moral absolutes. The fewer books you read, the easier it is to become fundamentalist. I'm not going to listen to a president who only reads one book pass judgment on other people who read one book.

"In some ways, my anti-war stand here is also a stand on anti-illiteracy. Someone should get G.W. into a reading program, get him to join a book club. Have him read Hamlet, King Lear."

"As an artist you live in conflict and contradiction, you make your art out of conflict and contradiction. The average person who's worked four years at a graveyard shift in 7-Eleven has more intellectual imagination than G.W."

None of that, of course, means that a 7-Eleven worker or a poet or film director knows squat about Iraq.

WHAT GIVES ALEXIE, or any artist or celebrity, the authority to stand up in public, at a podium, and talk to thousands of people about international politics? Why, just because he's an artist, should anyone listen to or care about what he thinks?

"I've always been very political in my art," he says, "but to speak out publicly on a specific stance, I haven't done that.

"We have responsibility to our art, first and foremost. I've always been reluctant to speak out before. The thing is, the whole history of artists is political.

"Before [Hamill's protest], I was going to get arrested. One of the things I was planning was I was just going to stand downtown and start talking and see what happens. And now, I probably won't get arrested. I was going to do a little one-person protest. Maybe get myself beat up, get on the news.

"But the place to do that would be Spokane, not Seattle. I'm tired of leftist liberal rhetoric as well. Saddam Hussein is a sociopathic monster. But we haven't even begun to discuss what to do about it. And we haven't talked about instituting international policies that would prevent men like that from coming to power. And that would require having international policies based on morals and ethics, and not economics.

"Wouldn't it be great if we could send Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, John Updike, Nathan Lane . . . grab 20 artists and send them to Iraq?"

Laura Bush inadvertently sparked a new organizationPoets Against the War. And Sherman Alexie is one.

"The poetry cancellationif they somehow think that they can silence us, or ignore us, or think we're irrelevant, we're certainly going to prove them wrong."